The following is an edited excerpt of conversations I had with a friend in 2019 about music theory, I hope it somehow helps someone

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please I need music theory help

What are you struggling with?

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Uuuuhhhh Overlapping tracks? Creating a main tune?

so are you writing your piece in a certain key/mode? if not, is that intentional

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Not intentional

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(Sir not appearing in this film) Do it in a minor key

No, fuck you we’re doing it in Aeolian

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I’m not doing it in minor it’s for a happy game

Fine, dorian. Also, minor can sound happy, like 90% of my music is in A Aeolian

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I have no idea what Aeolian means

Okay so in functional harmony (which is what I’m going to make you use whether you want to or not)

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Listen, I picked up a music software and started messing around, I don’t know what I’m doing

There are 7 modes of the major scale, which is about as much complexity as I have the energy to explain today

The most common are Ionian and Aeolian in order they are: Ionian, Dorian, Phyrgian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian

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Okay, what’s the difference between the 7 modes

They all use the same notes, but in different ways:

• Ionian is the most common by far and most theory revolves around it
• Aeolian is less common but there is some theory specific to it
• The others are treated as afterthoughts which is a shame, cause if you ask me Lydian and Phrygian are fire
• The most basic mode you see for teaching is C Ionian, which is C D E F G A B

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Wait, are the modes just which note is the base one of the scale?

Well you’ve got the base note and then the mode type, like C Aeolian is gonna be C D Eb F G Ab Bb but C Lydian is gonna be C D E F# G A B

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What’s Eb?

E flat

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Isn’t that the same as D#?

…technically? They’re the same actual pitch, just different ways of thinking about it. The way I think of it is Eb where an E would make sense or D# where D would make sense. (shit explanation but it worked for me)

Not all scales are 7 notes though, but I’m gonna stick to the easier stuff

Okay so now I get to talk about functional harmony

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I kinda know what makes a note work with another Well, if the note is the base note in the scale (like A in A Ionic), then a complementary note (i don’t know the actual word) is the 3, the 5, and the 7 (so C, E, and G) …I think?

I mean you’re not wrong but I don’t think you get the whole picture, but thankfully that’s what I’m here to infodump about

Chords in the Ionian Mode

Let’s look at the Ionian mode since that’s the most common

You’ve got 7 notes, let’s call them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. You’ve also got 7 chords, one for each note:I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii° you make these by taking every other note, so like a IV chord is gonna be notes 4,6, and 1 whereas a vii° is 7, 2, and 4

Notice how all the chords are capitalized differently (I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii°)

That tells you what kind of chord it is I, IV, and V are your major chords ii,iii, and vi are minor chords

vii° is a diminished chord, this is an abomination and should never be used

• Actually diminished chords are useful but a lot of music theory education just glosses over them, mihi quoque

< … >

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Quick question though, the (I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, vii0) chord, what mode is the capitalization based on?

Ionian, Different modes have different patterns

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Wait, I thought Ionian was the major, So how does it have minor chords

Intervals

So in music there’s these things called intervals that tell you how far apart two notes are

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Oh yeah, I have a rough idea,The modes vary based on their combination of whole and half notes right

Yep

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And they all have like a “base” scale, where all the notes are normal (no sharps or flats)

All the modes I gave you are just the same pattern starting on different notes

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Then you can shift the scales around by changing what their starting note is

Yeah, so like F ionian is F G A Bb C D E, and G lydian is G A B C D# E F# All the modes I gave you have two half steps, also called minor seconds

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So a minor second is a half step?

And a major second is two half steps, like the distance between C and D

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Ah, a whole step

There’s also diminished thirds, minor thirds, major thirds and augmented thirds In order they’d be

• d3: C to D (3 half steps, the same as a Major 2nd)
• m3: C to Eb (4 half steps)
• M3: C to E (5 half steps)
• A3: C to E# (6 half steps, the same as a Perfect 4th)

You can think of major intervals as the distance from the tonic to note X of the major scale

• Tonic here means the base note of your scale, like the one it’s built around

Minor Intervals Minorare a half-step below major Diminished intervals are two half-steps below major Augmented Intervals are a half-step above major

These definitions don’t apply for the 4th, 5th, 8th, and 0th, which are called Perfect Intervals

• They’re called that since they sound nice with the tonic. The 8th and 0th are the tonic itself actually
  • They also act weirdly with interval names since they don’t have major or minor versions For these, augmented is +1 half-steps and diminished is -1

Going through the whole octave it’s

Side note, 6 half-steps (A4/d5) is known as the tritone which is a very unstable interval, in contrast to the perfect intervals

This seems complicated to explain but I swear it makes sense when you’re actually using these and practice and not listening to a madwoman describe this over text

The only ones I have memorized are P5 (7 half-steps), P8 (12), and m3 (2) and the rest you can kinda work ot from there

If you’re looking at sheet music it’s a bit easier to see than on a piano roll, a 2nd is from a line to the nearest space (or vice versa), and a 3rd is a line to a line or space to a space, if you hop another line/space from there you get a 5th, and so on

It’s also worth noting that you can invert an interval, you can think of it like reaching the same note but going in the opposite direction, ie C to the G below would be a P4 instead of a P5

The rule of thumb for inverting intervals is:

• The number $N$ inverts to $9-N$ , except for P0 and P8 which invert to each other
• minor inverts to major and vice versa
• augmented inverts to diminished and vice versa
• the tritone inverts to itself

Chord names

Okay so with that background out of the way we can talk about chord names

The most basic kind of chord is the triad, which is 3 notes which are a third apart

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A Major third?

A third. That gives you 4 different types of chords you can make

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You didn’t explain shit, what do you mean “A third”

Any type of third, usually major or minor

• Generally diminished and augmented intervals aren’t used much because “And they were both bottoms” is not a viable strategy

For example, in the ionian mode, we say that the vi chord is minor because it has a minor third and a major third, but the IV chord is major because it has a major third and a minor thid

Harmony

This is extremely reductive but as a starting point:

You want to have chords under your melody, and you want to have roughly the same notes in both You can (and arguably should) have a little bit of a difference though

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What do you mean by under the melody?

Say you have a melody like this:

One way of putting chords with it (aka harmonizing it) is this:

• Here I use i - VI - III - VII

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So the chords should be lower pitch from the melody

I mean a lot of the, but that’s not required, hell the melody is often part of the chords themselves

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When you have a chord and a melody playing at the same time, which note of the chord should be harmonic with the melody? The lowest note? the highest note?

I kinda pick whatever chord shares the most notes, or the lowest or the highest, honestly just try anything and trust your ear

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So the chords can be in a different key from the rest of the song?

Ehh not really? I’d say the chords determine the key of the song

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Yeah but you said you used i - VI - III - VII. The last 3 are capitalized and thus are major chords

Ah, good catch, I wrote this in A Aeolian, which has a different chord pattern than Ionian

• I’m only using the white notes so it’s some mode of C ionian, we keep returning to A and we end on a G chord which makes me think we’re in A Aeolian
• The original melody could feasibly in any white-notes-only key, but when you add the chords, there’s a feeling of trying to return to A The chord pattern in Aeolian goes like i - ii° - III - iv - v - VI - VII

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What the fuck

Like I said, don’t worry about memorizing these things, you can just kinda figure them out again as you go

Remember the Ionian chords? if you start on the 6th note, you get vi - vii° - I - ii - iii - IV - V, which looks just like the Aeolian chords. This is since Aeolian is literally just Ionian but if you start on the 6th note

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I also heard from a trusted source that Aeolian is not what is considered the classic “minor key”

…who the fuck is your trusted source?

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They said Aeolian is “natural minor”

Ah shit, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask about that. Aeolian is the regular minor scale aka Natural Minor

If you bring the 7 of that up a half step, you get Harmonic Minor, This has the benefit of giving you Vinstead of v which gives the dominant a stronger movement to the tonic. The downsides to Harmonic minor is that you’ve got a III+ chord now (which makes switching to the relative major harder) and a vii° chord which can be harder to work with than a regular vii. It also gives you a weird amount of space between your 6 and 7 (3 half-steps)

If you bring the 6 up as well, you get Melodic Minor, which is a bit easier to work with since 6 and 7 are now back to being a whole step apart. This changes your iv to a IV and a ii instead of ii°, but at the cost of you gaining a vi°

… you’ve also made me realize that I’ve just straight up forgotten to explain chord functions

There’s 3 main functions chords can have, though these aren’t hard and fast rules, just general vibes

• Tonic: These are the ones that feel the most comfy and stable to hang around

  • The 1st chord of a scale is the called the tonic chord, but other chords can serve tonic function too
  • In Ionian they’d be I, vi and iii in order of decreasing strength

• Dominant: These are the ones that try to pull you back to the tonic, they create tension, and moving to the tonic releases that tension

  • The 5th chord of a scale is the called the dominant, but as with the tonic other chords dominant function can be done by other chords
  • In Ionian they’d be V, vii° and ii

• Subdominant: These aren’t as strongly functional, they can move towards dominants, but they can just as well move anywhere else

  • The 4th chord of a scale is called the subdominant, honestly you can kinda use anything for subdominant function if it feels right

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Just to clarify, “Key” means which mode you’re using, right?

Yeah, I mean it can also give you information about what specific note the tonic is (eg C major, F lydian etc) but I’ve been trying to avoid that where I can

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And the numbers indicate which note in the scale is the lowest note, right?

….christ you keep asking inconvenient questions

The short answer is yes, the long answer is who gives a shit put them in whatever order you want The classical music theory answer is “You can, but it gets weaker when you do”

• If you move the top note of the chord to the bottom (eg, C - F - A) you’ve got an F chord in 1st inversion
• If you do that again (eg A - C - F) you’ve got 2nd inversion
• in modern music you’ll usually see these written as something like F/C and F/A (read as “F over C” and “F over A”)

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So when doing a chord progression, how long should the chords stray from the tonic chords?

• Up to you, that sort of thing has to do Harmonic Rhythm and the actual length of the progression you want to write, but that’s not really something I’m good at so I usually fall back to 4 or 8 chord loops
• The most common chord progression you’ll see is I - V - vi - IV, while VI - V - iii - vi shows up a lot in japanese music

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So the I - IV - V (tonic-subdominant-dominant) progression usually has another chord added to it, right?

Yeah, or you can make something longer or shorter, you basically have free reign as long as it sounds good to you

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“as long as it sounds good” is a recurring theme here

It’s called music theory not music practice

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Anything about the melody of a piece?

No, I’m absolutely dogshit at writing those.

They don’t really teach you about actually writing music in music theory, it’s more of a way to analyse pieces, but that can help you make your own.

After learning about the basics (at least as far as the classics go) you’re kinda left on your own to cobble together as much shit as you can.

Like I tried learning about synth design from shostakovich

• Mira from 7 Years later here: what the fuck does this mean, I have no idea, can someone else explain to me what I meant by this

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Music writing as Mozart intended it

Don’t. Don’t get me started on that

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anyway, how do I make it so that my melody and my base (chord or not) don’t interfere?

I guess use similar notes in both? avoid tritones and minor 2nds unless you can make them work Personally I’ve found that things are less dissonant when working in higher registers

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Tritones? Synth design? Chord progression? Major intervals? Aeolian? Psycho Mantis?

Please just let me go to bed

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Wait, so when you say to avoid a major 2nd, what does that mean?

If you have like a C in your chord, don’t put a D in your melody or don’t make it super noticeable if it sounds bad

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So the two notes don’t have to be in harmony?

Dissonance can be a useful tool, cause if everything always sounds clean and consonant then you’ve just got a boring song

< … > The next conversation we had was about my pronouns and I said any/all which gives you an idea of how long ago this was